


In Memoriam

by shewho



Series: All is Well (It’s Only Blood) [4]
Category: Blue Bloods (TV)
Genre: Catholic Guilt, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Non-Canonical Character Death, Off-screen death, Passive Suicidality, Police Procedural, Siblings, Suicidal Ideation, Tags Contain Spoilers, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-10-24 04:46:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10734396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewho/pseuds/shewho
Summary: The thing is, Erincan’t do this, not again, with the bagpipes and the bullshit and the beautiful service accompanied by a blue sea of cops because it doesn’t changeanythingand Jamie is still dead.-------Or, the day of Jamie Reagan’s funeral, as told by his last living siblings.





	1. Danny Reagan

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to Part Four, the penultimate installment of “All is Well (It’s Only Blood)”, the massive fic re. the death of your favorite baby Reagan and mine, Jamie! In this part, you will see: the day of Jamie’s funeral, as told in somewhat-non-sequential overlapping stories by Danny and Erin Reagan. It’s a lot of familial grief and general angst, if the tags have been at all unclear about that.
> 
> Be forewarned, the suicidal thoughts/ideation is definitely there, though I would not say that it is particularly detailed (Chapters 1 & 3), so yeah, you know what you gotta do; stay safe, tread careful.

Danny and every partner he’s ever had, practically everyone he’s ever known, have been busy on their phones since the call went out on the police band, playing phone-tag back and forth with every shred of possible information, calling up and tracking down every shady CI and underground contact they’ve ever made.

Someone has to know why this happened; things like this don’t just _happen_.

But the day of the funeral arrives without any answers to the mounting number of questions.

They’ve all gathered at the Reagan family home to dress and leave for the funeral together, and Danny finds himself standing in his childhood bedroom, staring at his reflection with unnecessary intensity.

He’s wearing his dress uniform, which feels so familiar that is must be wrong. There is nothing to differentiate this moment from any other when he’s worn the same pressed blue pants and stiff-collared shirt with that stupid tie and heavily shined shoes, only this time his brother this dead.

His mouth feels like it’s full of sand as anger scalds over him in a wave, white and hot. “Fuck me!” he screams apropos of nothing, fighting the urge to kick a dresser or smash a mirror. “Fuck my whole stupid fucking useless fucking fuck shit-fucked life!”

“Danny.”

Danny jerks his head sideways at the sound of his name, a snarl settling instinctively on his lips when he hears the tone it’s said in. His father is standing in the doorway, solid frame effectively blocking the detective’s exit.

“Move,” he growls impertinently.

“I am not moving until you settle the hell down. You’re scaring the boys.”

“He was on his _lunch break_. He wasn’t even on duty. And they shot him for no reason!”

His father is right in front of him, but Danny’s having trouble seeing him. Everything’s gone fuzzy, all blurred around the edges. Just as quickly as it flares, the anger is replaced by a bone-deep exhaustion. His knees sort of collapse under him, and he leans his forehead against his father’s broad shoulder, breathing in the familiar smell of bay rum and wool. His chest hurts. “I’m not sure I can do this again, Dad.”

His father’s big hand comes up to stroke the back of his head. “We’ll figure it out.”

The tone he uses is a firm one, one that Danny knows is the same as a promise from Frank Reagan, who’s never broken an oath in his entire goddamn life. For a long time, he just focuses on blocking out everything but the feeling of his father’s fingers combing through the short bristles of his hair the way they used to when he woke up from the throes a nightmare as a child.

He’s just barely able to get himself together by the time his grandfather calls his name up the stairs, telling Danny to hurry up and dress, it’s nearly time to leave for the funeral. Even still, his whole body feels sore and cracked wide open.

Sometimes, he wishes he’d died out in that desert.

He doesn’t realize he’s spoken aloud until the choked-off sound his father makes reaches his ears.

“Dad.” His voice cracks, “I didn’t mean it.”

The commissioner stiffens, his shoulders perceptibly tensing up where they’re pressed against Danny.

“I didn’t mean it,” he says again around the sudden tightness in his chest, desperation threading through his tone. “I swear I didn’t.”

“But you said it,” his father replies, “And that makes me more than a little concerned.”

“Don’t be; I’m fine,” he mutters, scrabbling for a shred of composure. He pulls himself out of his father’s grasp and roughly wipes the dampness from his eyes with the cuff of his shirt.

His father measures him with cool, dark eyes, “Could’ve fooled me.”

Danny shrugs slightly, feeling a lump in his throat like he’s about to cry or scream or something. “I’m not gonna _do_ anything. I never do.” He sighs, scrubbing a hand over his eyes, “Other than the fact that it’d probably kill Grandpa, suicide’s a sin.”

For one fleeting second, he thinks that his father’s gonna slap him.

Instead, the man just crosses his arms over his chest, his posture tight and his eyes bright with anger. It’s the same look he gets when somebody’s fucked up _severely_ at work, and he’s about to be forced to do some serious damage control, complete with the muscle tic in his cheek. “I’m your father first and your boss second, but understand that it’s a major part of both those job descriptions to worry about you.”

He flashes his father and his boss a mouthful of teeth in a poor approximation of a proper smile. “Sure thing, Dad.”

*

He remembers the first time that Jamie got beat up _bad,_ back before the kid learned to take _or_ throw a decent hit. The sound of Erin’s bare feet tearing up the driveway, the screen door slamming, and then his baby sister – who musta been maybe thirteen, fourteen – standing on the first floor landing screaming his name at the top of her lungs, completely disregarding their ma’s rule about _“Inside voice, Erin_ _Kathryn Reagan!”_

He remembers bolting from his room so fast he nearly took a header down the stairs, remembers the blood draining from Joe’s face when he saw the look on Erin’s, remembers the three of them sprinting towards the gathering crowd of practically every neighborhood kid under the age of eighteen.

He doesn’t remember much about the fight that ensued, but he remembers the aftermath well.

Their father gave the three eldest Reagan children a well-remembered and oft-quoted lecture about how, _“Reagan’s don’t do this. They don’t brawl in the street!”_ Jamie still had the resulting black eye and six stitches under his eyebrow when third grade picture day rolled around. Joe’s knuckles were scabbed and concrete-scuffed for weeks. Erin had a split lip that bled on and off for days, and a nasty graze on her elbow that eventually became a shiny white scar.

And Danny, much to his mother’s dismay and his grandfather’s delight, unequivocally ruined the shirt he’d been wearing, turning the vivid teal to a crusted, blood-stained brown that no amount of detergent could salvage.

*

At the bottom of the stairs, his sons are dressed for church. Shirts buttoned all the way up the neck and at the wrists, July heat notwithstanding; ties noosed around their necks, albeit slightly crooked.

Jack’s eye’s are blank and bloodshot when he lifts his head, and Danny starts to get this queasy feeling because he _knows_ that face. He remembers seeing echoes of that same blown-out look in his own eyes in the bathroom mirror for the first time _years_ ago, and just days ago, and far too often in between.

But then Jack blinks, grips Sean’s shoulder white-knuckle-tight, offers up a watery smile. Danny lets it go, his stomach beginning to settle. His boys have Linda’s temperament, not his own.

His boys’ll be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Passively suicidal Danny Reagan is the one true Danny Reagan, and if you don’t agree, clearly we’ve not been watching the same show.
> 
> 2) This is totally not relevant, but regarding the lecture about how “Reagans don’t do that” (which I’m sure was a recurring theme of every lecture those kids heard growing up): in one draft of this fic, there was a replying line from Mrs. Mary Margaret Reagan about how “but Donnellys do”. I have done a ridiculous amount of work to reconstitute a harmonious version of all the fictional New Yorks depicted in my favorite TV dramas, so if you’re into a headcanon where the kids of “The Black Donnellys” are second cousins to the Reagans on their mom’s side, hit me up. I have a flow-chart and a family tree and everything. There may be a crossover at some point, merely because I’m in love with the idea that one branch of the family became cops while the other became criminals. Alright, carry on.


	2. Erin Reagan

Erin wakes even earlier than usual, at an hour which most people – Nicky included – would deem obscene. Her body aches in the same bone-deep way it did during law school when she would go for stretches of two or three days at a time without sleeping at all. She’s absolutely fucking _exhausted_ but far too agitated to go back to sleep, going instead to make herself a cup of coffee with a sizeable splash of scotch.

It’s the kind of day where she wishes it would rain but knows that it won’t. She wants blinding rain that shakes trees and stings skin and pelts windows into a blurred silver sheen. Instead, the sun is already beginning to spread blue tendrils over the horizon.

Today, she realizes in a moment of stark comprehension, is the last day she will ever see her baby brother’s face.

*

Despite living in a house where murder was an all-too-frequent discussion topic at the dinner table, Erin Reagan grew up in a world where nobody she knew died very often.

Robbie Daniels who lived down the road was struck by a car while playing in the street when she was five and he was three. A drunk driver killed Sheridan McAndrew and her father in the summer of ’82. In tenth grade, JT Kirkpatrick drowned while trying to rescue his dog from a frozen pond. She remembers thirteen-year-old Debra Sullivan’s funeral in vague flashes: the virginal white coffin draped in a blanket of baby-pink roses, the whispers about untreatable blood cancer, the heavy smell of wet dirt as it rained on the procession inching its way up the road toward the cemetery.

Erin collects her dead gradually, but it’s not until she’s well into adulthood that the deaths in her life start to spike. They accumulate slower than those in her cop brother’s circle do, but she still amasses a few. Claire. Alexandra. Liz. Sonya. In short order she loses her grandmother, mother, and brother.

Well, make that ‘brother _s_ ’.

*

Even in death, laid out in his casket in the back of the church, Jamie is still the prettiest of all four – three, _two_ – of them.

She knows it’s mostly makeup that’s taken away the ethereal white-blue glow he had in the hospital’s overhead halogen lamps, knows that it’s not blood making Jamie’s cheeks look wind-bitten rosy. She knows that his eyelids have been glued closed, and his mouth sewn shut. She knows that there is a delicate black-stitched Y-shaped incision joining the bullet holes fanned out across his chest. She knows that his body is full of chemicals, that the undertaker and the medical examiner and the crime lab have all had their way with him. She _knows_.

But he doesn’t look dead. Not like Joe had, or Mom. He looks like he’s sedated, doped up on high caliber pain medication, wandering around somewhere deep inside his brain.

“Jamie’s dead,” she whispers to herself, testing the words out under her breath in the small room. It’s not the same as saying, “Jamie is five foot ten” or “Jamie loves lemon-flavored candies” or “Jamie has the best jump shot I’ve ever seen on a white boy”.

She remembers the first time she held Jamie, maybe eight hours after he was born. How tiny and fragile he seemed. How thirteen-year-old Danny had dropped his blasé teenage façade to coo over their newest kid brother. How Joe adamantly refused to hold him for nearly a month, stating that he’d hold the baby “when he’s more sturdy, Ma”.

That was the first time they were all together, a proper family, all hale and whole.

She can’t remember the last time they were all together.

Grandma died over fifteen years ago; Mom more than ten. Joe’s already been gone for nearly eight.

After Joe was killed, the three of them – she and Danny and Jamie – had formed a sort of unspoken agreement, a pledge to make conscious efforts in support of one another. Though they never spoke about it, they vowed to knit their warped frame back together, stronger at the broken places. And it worked, for a while. Triangles, after all, are one of the strongest geometric figures in existence.

Only now, the triangle, too, has collapsed. Left standing in its place remain a pair of points separated by the smallest imaginable space.

“Jamie’s _dead_ ,” she snarls, letting herself say it aloud for only the second time, something inside her snapping. “And he’s never coming back.”

He isn’t coming back, not ever. Not even though Erin keeps glancing up, expecting that familiar sideways grin, the crimson hoodie hung on the coat tree in the foyer, a flick of sandy hair just around the corner, ratty sneakers tossed on the rubber mat by the door, the quiet chuckle in the next room, but it’s always a trick of the light or the hum of the air ducts, nothing real. She has touched the wounds herself, had her doubts assuaged. It’s too much to expect a miracle, and she _knows_ better, she does.

They all do.

*

She can’t do this, not again, with the bagpipes and the bullshit and the beautiful service accompanied by a blue sea of cops because it doesn’t change _anything_ and Jamie is still dead.

*

There are a disgustingly large number of flowers surrounding the coffin, filling the church. A flower for every heart he ever touched.

She kind of wants to scream.

A week ago, she couldn’t have imagined praying over Jamie’s casket, or seeing Jamie’s grave.

Sydney shows up at the service, all done up in black. Erin wants to slap her. Syd didn’t love Jamie, and Jamie didn’t love Syd, not really. Not properly, not the way he was trying to muck something out an impossible set of circumstances with Eddie Janko.

Jamie would’ve torn down their great-grandfather’s bridge with his bare hands if Eddie Janko asked him to. He’d pull stars off the horizon, and shift the Appalachians to meet the Rockies, and she’s pretty sure that if Eddie’d asked him to leave the force and move to Minnesota to start a dairy farm, he would’ve put in his papers and vacated his apartment by the end of the day.

He wouldn’t even consider temporary relocation for Syd.

So when Sydney approaches her in the receiving line, sympathetic smile carefully painted on her face, Erin gives the girl a gentle hug and whispers in her scariest prosecutor voice that Sydney is absolutely _not_ welcome at the gravesite.

The unconcealed fear in Syd’s eyes when the older woman pulls away only serves to stoke the bitter fire growing in her gut.

*

She still doesn’t scream when Danny and five guys from the twelfth precinct carry Jamie out on their shoulders like he weighs nothing, but it’s a near thing.

*

Erin doesn’t cry at the burial, but her father does, eyes hidden behind his dark sunglasses. She stands to his left, Grandpa on his right, both of them ready to catch him lest he sway either way.

Nicky and Jack cry the quiet sobs of children acting the part of adults. She watches impassively as Sean buries his face in his brother’s shoulder until he can regain control of himself. When he turns back to the coffin, his face is wet and flushed.

With the hand not holding Danny’s, Linda keeps wiping her thumb right below her eyelid, keeping her mascara from trailing a series of wet streaks down her cheek.

“Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,” the monsignor intones, pausing to dab at his brow with a handkerchief. “And may perpetual light shine upon him.”

At her side, Danny heaves an unsteady breath. He smells like cheap coffee, funeral roses, and the high-tar cigarettes Erin’s begun carrying around like a talisman. His shoulders shake. Several of the others in the faceless crowd wipe at their eyes.

With a sharp wail, the notes of the goddamn bagpipes begin to float up above them, a high and piercing howl sailing out of the graveyard, crying out, crying for lost love, lost hope, lost promise, lost talent, lost life. The dearly beloved who’ve gathered together in a final tribute of respect cry, too.

Erin bundles her feelings down tightly under her lungs, refusing to break down in front of the strangers who feel like they deserve to mourn her brother. She can’t stop the minute shaking that seems to have taken up permanent residence in her limbs, but she will not let these people see her cry. Nobody’s allowed to see or hear her cry; not these interlopers, and most definitely not Nicky.

The necklace around her throat – her communion locket, freshly polished – feels like it’s strangling her. There are so many people watching. All these people who feel like they’ve earned the right to cry for Jamie’s death, Jamie’s _murder_.

_How dare they look so sad, so upset, so distraught; how dare they?_

Still, being in front of a crowd is always the same, whether it’s at state track and field, mock trial regionals, a New York Supreme Court, or a funeral. Years of experience kick in instinctively, and Erin stands a little taller in her heels, straightens her spine one vertebra at a time, holding her head aloft and her chin high.

Erin Reagan never wavers or weakens, even when – _especially_ when – she is falling apart inside.

Her eyes sweep over the throng of blue and black that surrounds Jamie’s grave. They’re nearly all city employees, mostly cops, and former cops. A good portion of the DA’s office. There’s a strong showing from the kids in the juvenile crime prevention program that Jamie was so ardently involved in. A handful of his Harvard classmates, two professors. Some people that he went to high school with. Families from their parish.

Near the back, close to the end of the graveside service, Erin notices Eddie Janko. The kid looks like an escaped ghost, nothing more than a pair of pale eyes and a set of bones folded up tight into the pleats of her dress blues. Her face is a mask of cold horror, mouth tilted down at the corners, jaw clamped tight, and Erin knows that her own features must look eerily similar.

She doesn’t scream as the casket is lowered into the ground, though she desperately wants to.

*

After it’s over, after Jamie is tucked deep down under the earth, she persuades Linda to take Nicky with her and the boys to the bar where one of their Grandpa’s old partners is holding the wake, and finally, _finally_ cries in her car, gross heaving sobs wrenched up from the depths of her gut.

Tears slip down her face, over the manicured fingers pressed hard against her mouth. She sobs; she wants to _scream_ , “Give me back my brother, give me Jamie back”. Her whole body shakes with the rough cries tearing out of her throat and echoing slightly in the stillness of her car interior, muffled by the heat of her palm.

It’s Joe all over again, only somehow _worse_ , somehow compounded. Because when Joe died – _when Joe was murdered_ , she reminds herself unnecessarily – they all grieved, _of course_ , but everybody knew, everybody acknowledged that death was just sort of the nature of the beast and an unfortunate occupational hazard, given his chosen profession.

But Jamie…for their mom’s sake, Jamie picked _law_ ; Jamie was supposed to stay _safe_.

She can’t contain herself. There is so much pent up inside of her, so many emotions, and _horrible,_ intrusive thoughts, and she doesn’t know how to express any of them with words because Reagans don’t _do that_ , they don’t talk about their feelings; they hardly even acknowledge that they have any. They keep everything locked and bottled up tight, and never, _never_ deign to show the world how they feel.

Reagans don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. The inside lining of a suit jacket pocket, maybe, but never a sleeve.

She slams a fist against the window, smacks the back of her head against the headrest, and screams a long, loud shriek that dissipates into a wail.

The collar of her black blouse is soaking wet by the time she cries herself out and starts the drive back towards Bay Ridge.

*

They – the adults – let Nicky and Jack and Sean pick out Jamie’s headstone, on the justification that they’d be the three left to visit it most frequently.

Linda hates the marker the kids decided on, thinks it’s garish. She’s not entirely wrong. The stone is almost unreasonably large, made of black marble shot through with veins of silver. Erin doesn’t mind it, even though it does clash spectacularly with the rest of the Reagans’ muted grey stones.

The epitaph reads “ _Beloved Son and Brother_ ”.

She’s been a big sister since she was four years old, but now she won’t be that ever again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) All the dead kids from Erin’s past are purely fictional. But! All the dead female lawyers are real victims of the L&O franchises. It’s really very dangerous to be an ADA in Dick Wolf’s Manhattan. Seriously, though; those cats are always getting killed or kidnapped or nearly-killed or threatened.  
> 2) Did you catch the “The Departed” reference? I know, I know, wrong Wahlburg; cuh-lassic movie, though.  
> 3) Literally we all hated Sydney, didn’t we? #JAMKO for life. Erin Reagan ships it. Vanessa Ray ships it. MAKE IT SO!  
> 4) Ah yes, the famous and renowned communion locket that Jamie swallowed. Apparently, it is his hidden talent. Spitters are quitters, y’all.  
> 5) No, Joe and Jamie do not have the (exact) same epitaph; Joe’s headstone canonically says “Loving Son and Brother”, Jamie’s says “Beloved Son and Brother”. Needless to say, Frank was really hoping to get ‘husband’ or ‘father’ on there, but he’s also kinda glad he doesn’t have to.


	3. Danny Reagan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> WOW we've reached the end of Part 4, can you even believe it? More familial angst, surprise.

Danny feels numb, standing at the edge of another freshly dug hole in the ground of the Reagan family plot. Erin’s sandwiched beside him, in between him and their father, close enough that he can feel her shaking. She hasn’t really stopped trembling since that first moment he saw her getting off the elevator at the hospital.

Three feet in front of them, the body of Jamison Elliott Reagan is lifeless, resting for all eternity in a shiny metal box.

He was supposed to give a eulogy but he couldn’t write one, not again. Instead, he’d sat ramrod-straight in the pew reserved for dead officers’ families for the second time in his life and listened to the monsignor laud the latest corpse in the dead-Reagan-parade.

He listened to his grandfather tell inane stories about Jamie’s childhood, and to his father struggle to give his second deceased son a distinctive eulogy, one without shades of Joe creeping into it. As the youngest of four children and three boys, Jamie rarely got anything that wasn’t a hand-me-down growing up. As such, they’re unanimously determined to give him a death all his own.

He listened to Renzulli talk about the cop that Jamie’d become, and Nicky as she stumbled through that poem about the kind, the witty, and the brave going down into the darkness of the grave, and he could hardly stand by the end when he had to get up and help carry Jamie’s coffin out of the church.

There is no ground beneath his feet now, and Danny feels like he’s losing control, like he’s seconds away from tumbling down into the hole beside his brother. His grip is faltering and he can tell; he can _feel_ the panic welling up, licking at the edges of his lucidity, picking at all the loose threads in the back of his mind. He feels unsteady and raw, the worst mix a soldier can be, the kind of shakiness that’ll get you killed, and he tries to push the feeling down, away, he _does_ , but he can’t, and that terrifies him.

He wants to fall to his knees and let the earth swallow him, too, the last of Frank Reagan’s boys; he wants to bury himself in a nest of blankets like he did when he was upset as a kid; he wants to go home and bloody his fists on the wall of his shower, screaming his throat raw under the icy spray; he wants to go hurtling down the BQE just as fast as his car can handle; he wants to run until the soles of his feet tear open; he wants to slam perps’ heads against walls, hear teeth and noses break under his hands; he wants to take a flying leap from the top of the fucking – no.

No, no, no. God, no. _No_.

That’s not what he wants. It’s really…it’s not.

It’s just that he’s spent the past three – _four? He can’t, he’s not sure, he couldn’t swear to anything right now, dammit_ – nights lying awake, picturing how it must’ve, might’ve gone down.

All he can think about is Jamie’s death. He’s run it over at least a thousand times in his head, his mind obsessively fleshing out the threads of stories and inferences he’s collected, piecing the day together from the after-action reports, and the sheaf of crime scene photos he demanded-more-than-requested, and the truths he knows from maybe-too-many years in the shit.

Jamie, sprawled in the street, in the dirt and blood, his own blood, surround by medical personnel and the contents of Eddie Janko’s wallet. Jamie, the vacant gaze of that last blood-soaked moment. And later, the puddle of blood void of Jamie’s body.

He wonders; did Jamie see it coming? Did he see the car, the gun, the shooter? Was he scared? Or was it sudden, and surprising?

He doesn’t know which is better. He doesn’t know which is worse.

*

It’s a telling fact about the dynamic of his family that, this time around, everybody knows better than to give Danny a flower to hold when the funeral starts. At Joe’s funeral, he’d mechanically stripped all the leaves off the stem, and then mindlessly tried to pull the thorns off the rose in the same manner.

Well, that’s how the story goes at least.

He just remembers wiping blood on his dress pants before dropping a bedraggled, bloodied bloom down into the hole, and the dull _thud_ that echoed up out of the grave when the flower hit the coffin.

Partway through the ceremony, he realizes that – in lieu of a rose – he’s got Linda’s hand locked in a grip so tight that his own hand is cramping. He lets go at the sudden realization that _he is hurting her_ , but she just squeezes back, four quick squeezes in time to the pulse pounding between his ears.

The rhythm is an easy one to pick out over the droning of graveside prayers, and he latches onto it, consciously counting every beat, reminding himself that _he’s not_ _dead_ _,_ _he’s still here_ , _he’s alive, alive, alive,_ even as his baby brother’s body is lowered down into the dirt.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth, as it is in heaven,” he murmurs along with the rest of the crowd. “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.”

His fingers twitch idly against his thigh, itching for a cigarette.

“Amen.”

*

Baez catches his eye over the crowd pretty much the moment the last prayers are said and motions to the phone next to her ear, and yeah, of course, he _gets it_ ; she’s still gotta work. So he waves her off, and then she’s gone.

Linda bundles the kids – and Nicky, who’s not really a kid anymore, but today nobody’s counting – into her car and leaves, almost immediately.

His wife, who hates funerals, who cries because she has nightmares about putting Danny in a box someday, who’s now watched his family bury both of his brothers.

His wife, who must have come to the logical conclusion that all Reagan boys will only leave the police force if they leave in coffins, whose coping mechanisms run the same line as Danny’s preferred ones, casual drinking and refined desensitization, with the added method of binge-watching crappy Lifetime movies in her rare spare time.

His wife, whom he loves.

His dad’s with some cadre of chiefs and superchiefs, and Grandpa’s surrounded by the old guard from his days as PC, and Erin’s fucked off to god-knows-where.

He’s left standing next to Jackie Curatola, who he hasn’t seen in over two years, shooting the shit like they’re not at a funeral because the two of them, they’ll do anything really to stave off the mood of apocalyptic doom that’s spreading over the cemetery like smoke.

“Hey,” she says in the middle of some half-assed, half-constructed thought that’s worming its way out of his mouth. “That the partner?”

She doesn’t say “his partner” because she can’t, because Jackie knew Jamie back in the nineties, back when Jamie was still in his last year of _high school_ , and all through undergrad. Jackie couldn’t cook for shit, still can’t cook for shit, and would show up at the house from time to time unannounced, to nobody’s shock or dismay. Their mom loved Jackie, thought that Jackie stuck the stars up in the sky, and Grandpa adored Jackie, and Linda appreciated Jackie, and he’s known Jackie for longer than almost anybody who’s not his family, and Danny knows _exactly_ why Jackie uses “the” instead of “his”.

“Yeah,” he mutters, “That’s Janko.” He’s not quite sure how he gets her attention, whether it’s with a sharp whistle or a shout of her name, but Eddie turns those damned pale eyes towards the two of them and starts picking her way through the gradually disbanding crowd.

“How are you?” he asks quietly when she arrives in front of them.

He half expects her to snap, _“How the hell do you think I am?”_ but she doesn’t. Eddie Janko blushes, cheeks pinking under the pallor that’s settled over the young officer. “A little embarrassed, but pretty okay, considering,” she says, wiping her eyes for the hundredth time in an hour with the back of her hand.

“You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about,” Jackie reassures her. “You weren’t the only one that lost it there.”

The blonde huffs out a snort that borders on the barest edge of a sob, stuffing a loose strand of hair back under her cap. “The humidity is fucking stupid,” she mutters as she turns to surveil the dispersing assemblage of mourners. “He woulda hated this.”

Danny’s heart throbs dully because _she’s not wrong_.

Jamie absolutely would hate this, the whole idea of it. He loved the cold, loathed the heat, especially after Joe died. Summers grew shadowed with subdued grief in the Reagan home after that, August remaining particularly tainted. But even before that, Jamie never really liked to see the weather warm up. He always loved winter best. Danny used to make fun of the kid for running around outside until his lungs and throat burned and he could hardly speak, but Jamie always insisted that the cold air had a distinct taste and smell, one that he couldn’t seem to get enough of.

Eddie lets a single soft chuckle break the silence. “I miss him more than he ever could’ve imagined,” she says, a frown puckering her brow. A brief expression of – something, something he can’t quite place – wavers across her features as Danny’s stomach does a strange twist. There’s something that the younger officer’s holding back, he’s sure of it. She doesn’t say anything more, though; just nods at him and Jackie, and starts to walk off towards the road.

Still, Danny’s been doing this job too long to ignore the indisputable fact that something’s off about her. Something subtle, but it sends his long-honed detective senses tingling nonetheless, like an insect burrowing under his skin. It’s just an itch at first, but the more he considers the wrong-footed feeling, the deeper the insect burrows into him. A sharp surge of irritation spikes through him when he can’t immediately identify what it is about Janko that makes the hair on the back of his neck prickle despite the summer heat.

Eddie Janko’s voice echoes through the recesses of his mind _._

_I miss him more than he ever could’ve imagined._

_I miss him._

Oh, _shit._

When the realization comes, it hits him with enough force to effectively vacate all the air from his lungs.

Janko is – or was, _fuck_ – ass-over-heels for Jamie.

God, they were probably in love with each other for fucking _years_ and just kept refusing to admit it to anyone so that their sergeant didn’t have to split the pair up, as per policy. He seriously would not put it past either one to keep something like tucked away from everyone, even themselves.

Somehow, that single thought is the most terrifying one he’s had all day.

He wants to go back in time, cuff his brother on the back of the head, tell Jamie to get it together; he wants time to shake the ever-loving shit out of the two of them, the fucking moronic idiots.

They could’ve been so fucking happy.

Instead, his brother is dead, and Eddie Janko looks like she’s one bad tour away from joining him.

“Jesus,” he murmurs, swaying a little.

“You gonna faint on me?” Jackie asks, grabbing his shoulder, her eyes gone dark and a little wild around the edges.

He shakes his head, which only serves to make the dizziness worse. “No. Nah, I’m good. I just realized that I haven’t eaten anything today. Or since, like, coffee yesterday. But it’s okay!” he rushes to reassure her. “I don’t feel it.”

He doesn’t say “I don’t feel anything”, but Jackie has known him a long time and he’s pretty sure it telegraphs clearly on his face.

Jackie grips the meat of his forearm, steadying him. “Call me later, okay? Whenever you get around to it. Lemme know you’re still alive and kickin’.” She says it like it still might be a joke, but she’s had two former partners who later ate their guns, so it’s really, really not.

“Yeah, Jack,” he mutters, unable to meet her eye.

“You call me, Danny. Don’t forget.”

“Got it.”

*

Merely because of who he is as a person, he doesn’t call Jackie for nearly a week. He doesn’t offer an apology when he finally does, and Jackie doesn’t want one. They make plans for coffee that one of them will inevitably bail on to their equal relief.

So it goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Unlike Daniel Fitzgerald Reagan and Joseph Conor Reagan, Erin and Jamison don’t actually have canon middle names! In this universe, they’ve been given Kathryn and Elliott, respectively. Kathryn is Bridget Moynahan’s actual first name (Bridget’s her middle name IRL); Elliott (two “L”s, two “T”s) is in reference to Elliott Roosevelt, the scandal-prone third son of FDR and Eleanor. The Reagan clan has a serious obsession with all things Roosevelt, and, like Jamie, Elliott was his mother’s favorite son. And for those who thought it was an L&O Stabler reference: that particular Elliot only has one “T”. 
> 
>  
> 
> 2) The poem Nicky recites is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music”.


End file.
